Film Forum & Rooftop Films partner with Socrates Sculpture Park Outdoor Cinema, for 8-Week Int'l Summer Fest to begin 7/3

Film Forum programmers Karen Cooper and Mike Maggiore have selected six of the eight films for the Socrates Sculpture Park Outdoor Cinema film festival this summer, with the other two coming via Dan Nuxoll and Mark Elijah Rosenberg of Rooftop Films. The series, to which admission is FREE, begins this Wednesday, July 3, and is presented by Socrates Sculpture Park and AT&T. The annual international festival, now celebrating its 15th anniversary, features open-air cinema, music, dance and food -- held in the 5-acre waterfront park in Long Island City, Queens.

Outdoor Cinema 2013 features eight weeks of movies shown under the stars, Wednesday evenings, July 3 through August 21. While New York City hosts many outdoor movie series, this festival distinguishes itself by its critically acclaimed, international array of titles. This summer's lineup includes work from Chad, the Dominican Republic, France, Germany, Mexico, Romania, South Korea, Turkey, and the United States. The films are presented in their original language with English subtitles. Each evening features regional cuisine from neighborhood restaurants and performances by local musicians and dancers that celebrate the culture of the film's country of origin.

This year's film subjects range from Richard Nixon (top) and pro baseball (Sugar, below) to a glorious father-son vacation on the coast of Mexico (above) and a new film from Romania (at left) which I beieve is having its U.S. premiere here under the stars. Pre-screening performances take place at 7:00pm and films begin at sunset (weather permitting). Admission to films and performances is free of charge. The evening's food and performance line-up is announced the week prior on the park's web site: www.socratessculpturepark.org. "All these years, notes Film Forum's Karen Cooper, "we've been committed to the 'hardtop,' but now we are pleased to be able to screen some of our favorites from around the world out-of-doors in this glorious park."

OUTDOOR CINEMA 2013 FILM SCHEDULE 

(The descriptions below come from the press release 

on this festival. Any additional comments 

by TrustMovies will appear in parentheses/italics.)

July 3: OUR NIXON (U.S.)
Throughout Richard Nixon's presidency, three of his top White House aides obsessively documented their experiences with Super 8 home movie cameras. Young, idealistic, and dedicated, they had no idea that a few years later they'd all be in prison. (Golly: I wonder why we can't say the same about members of this last Bush administration, not to mention all those bankers and Wall Streeters who helped cause our current recession? We once lived in a world that punished criminals. This movie ought to remind us, and how dreadfully, times have changed.) OUR NIXON is an all-archival documentary presenting those home movies for the first time, along with other rare footage, creating an intimate and complex portrait of the Nixon presidency as never seen before. 2013, 84 mins. Directed by Penny Lane. Not Rated. Courtesy of Cinedigm. Programmed by Rooftop Films. 

July 10: A SCREAMING MAN (Chad)
Ironically titled, this drama set in Chad follows the fortunes of Adam, a former swimming champion, now a 60-year-old "pool man" at a tourist hotel. Tensions between Adam and his grown son are exacerbated when the former loses his job to the younger man and his fragile world begins to crumble. The country's endless civil war plays a decisive role in defining the two men's psychic reality in this smart, subtle, and deeply moving story of modern Africa. Winner, Jury Prize, 2010 Cannes Film Festival. 2010, 92 mins. Written & Directed by Mahamat-Saleh Haroun. Not Rated. Programmed by Film Forum.

July 17: ALAMAR (Mexico)
A love story between father and son, man and nature, water and sky, ALAMAR is set in the turquoise waters of Banco Chinchorro in the Caribbean, home to thousands of species of fish. The film – somewhere between fiction and documentary – tells the story of a young boy whose divorced parents (Italian mother, Mexican father) make him a child of two worlds. A father transports his urban son to this natural paradise to teach him to dive for lobster and fish for barracuda, spending days on a tiny fishing boat and nights in a reed-roofed cabin that floats atop the water. (TM's earlier review and interview with the filmmaker can be found here.) 2009, 73 mins. Written & Directed by Pedro González-Rubio. Rated G.
Programmed by Film Forum.

July 24: IN ANOTHER COUNTRY (South Korea)
French actress Isabelle Huppert stars (three times!) in this comedy/drama – a triptych set in a Korean seaside town. Huppert plays three different Annes – a successful film director on holiday with a Korean director and his wife; a married woman having an affair with a Korean man; and a recent divorcée whose husband left her for a Korean woman. Three breezy tales of love, lust, and misunderstandings, all peppered by the dimly jovial propositions of one persistent lifeguard. 2012, 89 mins. Written & Directed by Hong Sang-soo. Not Rated. Programmed by Film Forum. 

July 31: DOMESTIC (Romania)
Wonderfully surreal, painfully real – this is the story of children, adults, and animals that live together trying to have a better life, but sometimes death comes unexpectedly. In the bittersweet comedy Domestic, it is all about us – people who eat the animals that they love, and the animals that love people unconditionally. (With no U.S. distribution that I know of, this movie might not be seen again soon, or ever, so you might want to catch it now.) 2013, 82 mins. Directed by Adrian Sitaru. Not Rated.
Programmed by Rooftop Films.

August 7: SUGAR (U.S. / Dominican Republic) Miguel, a Dominican baseball pitcher from the small town of San Pedro De Macorís, single-mindedly focuses on training at a pro baseball academy – as so many in his country do – awaiting his chance to graduate to the minor leagues in the U.S., and to help pull his family out of poverty. At 19, he gets his break – a call-up to spring training for a team in Iowa – but what happens when his game falters? And were all the sacrifices worth it? A beautifully filmed, exquisitely acted drama from Brooklyn filmmakers, Boden & Fleck (HALF NELSON), that takes a bracing new look at a fractured American dream. 2008, 120 mins. Written & Directed by Anna Boden & Ryan Fleck. Rated R. Programmed by Film Forum.

August 14: THE GLEANERS AND I (France)
Considered "the grandmother of the New Wave" in France, Agnès Varda melds literary and documentary conventions with the politics of feminism and compassion, and a whimsical touch that is all her own. THE GLEANERS AND I, inspired in part by the Jean-François Millet painting, uses the subject of gleaning (the act of gathering leftovers) to create a warm and witty discourse on, among other things, the nature of consumerist society and the role of creativity in survival. 2000, 82 mins. Directed and narrated by Agnès Varda. Not Rated. Programmed by Film Forum.

August 21: THE EDGE OF HEAVEN (Germany/Turkey)
This drama from the German-born, Turkish-descended filmmaker explores the lives of six characters, including two young women: a Kurdish political activist wanted by the German authorities, and Lotte, a naïve German student who becomes sexually entangled with her. Fassbinder muse, Hanna Schygulla, plays Lotte's suspicious mother in this tale from a new Europe – one in which national boundaries are disappearing as quickly as traditional sexual norms. 2007, 122 mins. Written & Directed by Fatih Akin. Not Rated.
Programmed by Film Forum.

Rain Date: August 28

Socrates Sculpture Park is located at 
32-01 Vernon Blvd (at Broadway) in Long Island City. 

Queens Public Transportation to Socrates Sculpture Park: 
SUBWAY N or Q train to the Broadway stop in Queens and walk eight blocks west on Broadway (toward the East River) to the intersection of Vernon Boulevard. 
BUS Q103, Q104 to Broadway and Vernon Boulevard Q19A to Broadway and 21st Street.

Sex at Film Forum! Rob Schröder & Gabriëlle Provaas' MEET THE FOKKENS follows Ruth Lingford's LITTLE DEATHS

Ah, sex! Ah, Film Forum! Put the two together and, as those of you familiar with the latter (we're all, I hope, familiar with the former) might expect, we're going to get something a little different. In MEET THE FOKKENS, the new documentary from Rob Schröder and Gabriëlle Provaas, we indeed meet Louise and Martine Fokkens, identical-twin prostitutes working out of Amsterdam's famous red-light district. Ummmmm! Oh, wait: I should tell you that only Martine is currently working, as Louise's arthritis grew so bad that the poor woman, as she explains, could no longer get one leg over the other. These twins, you see, are 70 years old.

Lest you imagine that this film, due to its protagonists' age, is going to be somehow non-sexual, forget it. We see some hard cock along the way -- well, semi-erect, at least: Martine's clients are as old or older than the gal who services them. That servicing, it must be said, has now come down to mostly hand jobs and a little dominatrix work. Sex may be the hook here, but what Ms Provaas (below) and Mr. Schröder (at left) are really dealing in is life, aging, history and humanity in all its complexity -- with much of this, at least as we see it here, remark-ably benign. Some of you may have to divest yourself

of certain sexual hang-ups to appreciate the film: The need for and enjoyment of sex does not end, shockingly enough, with the loss of wrinkle-free skin and six-pack abs. Fortunately, the filmmakers, along with their subjects  have invested enough time and enegy to come up with some lovely early photos and film footage of the twins as girls and young women. We see how attractive and full of life they were (still are!) and how one of them fell in love with a rotter who soon had her working the streets for him. Sister joined the act, it seems, purely out of familial loyalty.

In any case, a solid career was born and the ladies subsisted on it for decades. We meet the married Fokkens' daughter who still, it appears, has a relationship with her dad, despite mom's annoyance. We see the Fokkens at work, above, and at play, below, and we begin to understand how they continue to thrive. (They've both become artists in their old age.)

We note how government representatives or maybe these are religious people -- This was not all that clear to me, but the friend with whom I attended the screening tells me that they are both -- try to help, as well as trying to direct these ladies' lives perhaps a bit too much. Overall, we're left with the sense that this particular story and these women simply could not exist in our own culturally and sexually backward America with anything approaching the kindness, care and tolerance we see here. The movie -- together with these gals -- is one for the books. From Kino Lorber and just 75 minutes long, Meet the Fokkens opens this Wednesday, August 8, at Film Forum for a two-week run. Click here for showtimes and/or tickets.

****************

Also on the program -- shown first, in fact -- is a delightful, sexy, funny and thoughtful animated short called LITTLE DEATHS (the term often used for orgasms), directed and animated by Ruth Lingford, who currently teaches animation at Harvard. Running just eleven minutes, the film offers up a wealth of visuals to accompany the musings of various folk on what the experience of orgasm is like. The responses range from the glorious (we hear a man's voice tell of getting fucked to the point of orgasm, of giving and receiving simultaneously) to the amusing ("It makes me think of broccoli": Justice Scalia would be proud!), while the visuals are even better: gorgeous, sexual though not explicit, and wonderfully malleable. In one instance a cunt changes into a cathedral -- or is it the other way around?

A near-constant visual delight in various styles (there's a lovely Leda & the Swan motif early on), the remarks that accompany the animation are quite special, too -- none more so than the person who notes, "To be able to produce such a grand feeling in someone else is a wonderful thing." Little Deaths (2010), directed and animated by Ruth Lingford, will open along with Meet the Fokkens, this Wednesday, August 8, at Film Forum. Click here to see dates and times: the short immediately precedes the longer features.

9/11, 24/7 -- had enough yet? TrustMovies certainly has, but not, it seems, Film Forum.

Every magazine on the newsstands, every newspaper, every news show on television has been hammering home the anniversary of the "big day" like no one had imagined this was coming. Why, what a surprise! Both New York and The New Yorker wasted an issue on the subject. Frank Rich's article in the former, at least, proved a good antidote.

Please. It is not as though we have not been reminded of 9/11/2001 almost daily over the past decade -- what with the non-stop terror alerts from the Bush administration -- who by the way, ought to by now have been taken out and hung as war criminals/profiteers. Oh, but the Obama team is now leaking their earlier fear of reprisals and a possible military coup, should a prosecution even have been undertaken. So then, there is no rule of law -- not when the highest can get away with the worst.

All the crowing about how there has not been any successful terrorist attack since 9/11 begs the question: Some large portion of the responsibility for the fact that that Twin Towers toppled can be laid at the feet of the Bush administration -- who had effectively turned off  the watchdog protection that had been in place during the Clinton years.

So what does all the above have to do with movies.  Only that Film Forum, a movie house much loved by yours truly, is devoting its entire tomorrow to free pubic screenings of the following film.  I had earlier planned to make more of this, but having by now run afoul of the 9/11, 24/7 genie, I cannot devote another minute to this "cause."  It particularly rankles because I do not believe that most of America has even processed the event itself, the underlying causes, or even the fact that by arming and encouraging the Afghan rebels to fight the Russians during that earlier, ill-advised war, we managed to help create the very thing that would later attack us on our own soil.

Oh, well: history is nothing most Americans need bother themselves with. Particularly world history.  "We're all connected"? Only, it would seem, if it's some TV commercial that is telling us so.

The single good thing I have read about terror, alerts and precautionary measures comes from a friend of mine's blog -- Ray Errol Fox. His recent post is both fascinating and oddly hopeful. Click the link above and take a few moments, if you can, to read it. Anyway, as promised, here's the info on tomorrow's Film Forum program:

TIME: VOICES OF 9/11: A New Documentary Produced by TIME Magazine; Movie Has Exclusive New York Presentation at Film Forum on September 11;
Free Screenings Commemorate the 10th Anniversary of the Attacks

Film Forum announces its one-day exclusive presentation of TIME: VOICES OF 9/11, the stories of men and women whose lives changed forever on September 11, 2001. These screenings will be free to the public. Tickets will be available at the box office on the day of show, on a first-come, first-served basis.


TIME: VOICES OF 9/11 will be screened throughout the day, beginning at 1pm, on Sunday, Sept. 11, at Film Forum, West Houston Street (W. of 6th Ave). Check www.filmforum.org for showtimes.


TIME: VOICES OF 9/11 (2011) Directed & Produced by Kira Pollack. Co-Director & Director of Photography: Marco Grob. Executive Producer: Rick Stengal. Editor: Karlyn Michelson. Interviewers: Kira Pollack, Kate Pickert, Paul Moakley.


Below are some of the people you'll meet (as though you didn't know Mr. Giuliani already...):



Daisy Khan, Executive Director of the American Society for Muslim Advancement, one of the interview subjects in TIME: VOICES OF 9/11. Photo credit: Marco Grob for TIME Magazine.


Jim Riches, retired FDNY Deputy Chief, one of the interview subjects in TIME: VOICES OF 9/11.
Photo credit: Marco Grob for TIME Magazine.

Joseph Pfeifer, FDNY Chief of Counterterrorism and Emergency Preparedness, one of the interview subjects in TIME: VOICES OF 9/11. Photo credit: Marco Grob for TIME Magazine

Ron DiFrancesco, a survivor who worked on the 84th Floor of the south tower of the World Trade Center, one of the interview subjects in TIME: VOICES OF 9/11.
Photo credit: Marco Grob for TIME Magazine.

Rudy Giuliani, former Mayor of New York, one of the interview subjects in TIME: VOICES OF 9/11. Photo credit: Marco Grob for TIME Magazine.

Valerie Plame Wilson, former CIA covert operations officer, one of the interview subjects in TIME: VOICES OF 9/11. Photo credit: Marco Grob for TIME Magazine.

The photos used in the opening paragraphs come from 

the web site September11News.com 

Nicolas Philibert's sad, fascinating NÉNETTE Up-close and personal with a very old soul

That 400-pound gorilla in the room? It's Nénette, she's an orangutan, and the room is a cage in the famous Paris zoo, Jardin de Plantes Exotiques. TrustMovies is not actually all that sure about her weight: It may be only 300 pounds, perhaps less. But she is by far the best ape-on-film since "Jenny" in last year's Creation, and she easily carries NÉNETTE -- the film that bears her name -- proving a subject of unending interest and delight. Made by the man, Nicolas Philibert (shown below), who some years back gave us one of the best films about children and schools (To Be and to Have), the movie quite cleverly leads us into the life of this 40-year-old Parisian.

Lasting but 70 minutes, Philibert's film begins with humans beings -- children, adults, the filmmaker and zoo-keeping staff -- simply observing Nénette. "I can't touch her," one staff member notes, as they talk about her red hair. "In Egypt, they used to kill redheads before birth," someone says (the subtitles translate it thus, but surely they mean "at birth" or soon after). All the while, the camera observes  the orangutan. This rather sideways approach works wonderfuly in easing us into the life of the ape. With each new and often very odd fact, together with what we see Nénette doing, we're further hooked.

In all her long and sometimes difficult history at the zoo, Nénette has only liked  two of her keepers, one of whom took eight years to forge his bond. While the children's take on this ape is often hilarious, at times the kids are so noisy and intrusive that you dearly hope her cage is soundproof. The movie educates us about her species, as well, as we watch the ape in action. (Seeing her cover herself with a sheet like good Muslim woman provides one of the movie's many charming moments.) After having her first baby, with the accompanying televisions camera, Nénette eventually turned from hiding from the cameras to "acting" for them."

We learn from the head keeper everything from the orangutan's lack of general ability to make noise (and how the large pouch under the neck enables them to make certain sounds) to their toilet habits.  Nénette has gone through three husbands, outlasting them all. Now, she has only her youngest son Tubo, and the staff  fears the possibility of incest, not knowing for certain how the orangutan society reacts to this. So they have put the ape on "the pill," which is given to her in her daily yogurt.  "What flavor?" asks a journalist.

Nenette's life, finally, is compared to that of an acting class, in which the subject is told "Just be there and let us watch you. This is a difficult thing to handle."  It's difficult to view Nénette and not feel, at last, that you are watching a life in captivity -- a kind of slavery, if you will. Seeing her mix her juice with her yogurt at the end of the film is one of the saddest images I've seen in a documentary.

Also on the program is Nick Park's five-minute claymation short CREATURE COMFORTS (made in 1989) in which a journalist interviews zoo animals who talk (in various cleverly-concocted accents) of their experiences.  Both films, I believe, are very anti-zoo: Nénette quietly and gradually, Creatures Comforts, obviously and humorously. The double bill (Nénette is being released via Kino International) opens in New York City at Film Forum this Wednesday, December 22, for a two-week run. Check screening dates and times here.

LOSS and RABBIT A LA BERLIN (a 2010 Oscar nominee) make Film Forum debut

Thanksgiving's over, but this week's debut of two short films -- that are probably only seeing the light of (theatrical) day due to New York's singular movie house that actually continues to show, week after week, real art films  -- strikes this reviewer, at least, as a particularly good reason to give thanks (yet again) for Film Forum. The movies in question (Loss and Rabbit a la Berlin) are the kind of fare, short of length and (seemingly) small of reach, that are yet so well conceived and executed that their existence simply demands some theatrical venue.  So, FF, thank you.

TrustMovies, who often says "Never again!," after viewing one... more... film about the Jewish Holocaust, urges you nonetheless to see the Israel/German co-production LOSS, which is one of the better -- and more unusual -- movies to tackle this subject that he has viewed in a long while. Made in 2002 and only now being shown here, it runs just 30 minutes.  But what minutes they are! Israeli filmmaker Nurith Aviv has several of her German friends (as well as Hannah Arendt), simply speak to the camera about what, in their minds, has been lost due to the German treatment of the Jews before and during the Holocaust -- and most tellingly, of the effect on German life and attitudes after World War II.

Ms. Aviv begins with a quote from Freud about mourning, then lets Arendt (shown at left) speak about her experience in Germany as the war approached and her intellectual set abandoned the Jews in reaction to Hitler and his plans.  "It was as though we were surrounded by an empty space," she says.  Chilling. Telling.

Then various of her friends in Germany talk about their own post-war experiences: A physicist and teacher (Gustav Obermaier, right) mourns the almost complete loss of good science (and good scientists) in Germany post-war, together with what happened when he came to America.

Linguist Jutta Prasse (left) explains, in a beautifully worded segment of such symbolism and feeling, how the wounds in German language have healed so badly that the scar tissue now disrupts real meaning. Claus Rath speaks of the fatherland and fathers after WWI and the results of this, and actor Hanns Zischler talks about the oddly vital "ghosts" of Berlin.

Through almost all of this, we are on a train moving through Berlin, the town of Aviv's ancestors, stopping at each station, then starting up again. The interviewees seems to be on that train, a part of it, though of course they are not.  But this adds a layer of strangeness to the work, as well as giving us the sense that these words spoken and ideas put forth are not conclusive. They stop and start, just as does the train, in a process that never ends. (For me, this train is memorable as one of the best, most quiet and profound "special effects" I've seen in a movie.) The train also brings to mind, of course, the Holocaust, though this connection is never spoken. Loss is such an intelligent, insightful and thoughtful piece -- clearly a permanent addition to the most important films about Germany and the Holocaust -- that I could easily have sat through it again, immediately after the initial viewing, or kept listening and watching, were it twice the length.

Charming, funny and pointed as it is, RABBIT A LA BERLIN (directed by Bartek Konopka, photographed by Piotr Rosolowski and co-written by both men) could have been nearly as effective at half its length, as it tells the tale of what happens to some generations of rabbits, the first of which were caught literally overnight in the area between the Berlin Wall(s). (Some of us may have imagined that the wall was simply a one-piece blockade, but evidently it was built with a good deal of space, grassy and otherwise, between its provocative sections.) What happens to these bunnies is funny, sad, a little grotesque and finally a fable-like metaphor for society at large -- and not just Germany, East and/or West.

Without predators, the bunnies thrive -- and change. And yet, even in this kind of paradise on earth, unknown in the history of the species (re-read Watership Down if you've gone rusty on rabbits), some begin to burrow out of their safe haven. Why? Hmmm.... This brings up all kind of ideas about safety, evolution, challenge and growth. We even witness a kind of rabbit Holocaust -- which makes these two films oddly well-matched co-features.
Rabbit à la Berlin keeps threatening profundity but, really, it remains more of a witty and quite enjoyable fable about post-war Germany and the rise of the rabbit -- and an interesting bit of history regarding change and endurance in the "natural" world.

Both films begin their two-week run at Film Forum this Wednesday, December 8.  You can find the schedule of performances here.

The photos above, from Rabbit à la Berlin, are courtesy of Film Forum; those from Loss are courtesy of Ms. Aviv's own website.